Comment Policy


Everything you need to know about commenting on this blog


Comment Deletion Policy

We reserve the right to remove any comments which we find offensive, inflammatory, or disrespectful. Differing opinions are welcome, but play nice, or don’t play at all.

We are all for free speech, but the Mudflats is a benevolent dictatorship and we make the final call.

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Offensive Language In Comments

Please keep your comments PG rated. Mudpuppies do read both I Heart The Mudflats and The Mudflats with their children, we know this for a fact.

If you use swear words your comment will usually end up in the spam bin. The swear word may be edited out before your comment is published.

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Sharing News Articles or Blog Posts

If you see a great article you want to share, please copy and paste only part of the article, and then include a link. If you post the entire article in a comment, it may be copyright infringement…and that’s not good - in fact in some countries it is illegal!

The same goes for the other way around. If you want to share one of our posts here, please include part of the post, and then link back to I Heart The Mudflats. Try not to quote more than 10% of the article you are linking to.

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Off Topic Comments

Off topic comments and conversations are welcomed and encouraged at The Mudflats Forum.

We are less strict on off topic comments here at I Heart The Mudflats than The Mudflats due to the nature of this blog.

If you go off topic on The Mudflats you will sometimes find your comment ends up being deleted unless it is an open thread.

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Linking To Your Own Website In Comments

Linking to your own blog in a comment is occasionally acceptable, but please don’t abuse this.

Outright promotion and solicitation to promote traffic on your own blog is generally not considered good form.

If you enter your url in the blank field as you make a comment, readers will be able to access your blog from that comment. If they’re curious, they’ll come visit.

Please note, we also have the blogroll where we will happily link to any mudpuppy blogs - visit the Blogroll page to request to be added to the blogroll. You must be a member of The Mudflats community for us to link to you - eg you must comment on the blog regularly or be a member of the forum.

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Links To Other Websites In Comments

We do welcome occasional linking to websites in blog comments.

However, please note -

There are many conservative blogs out there who have differing opinions than those expressed here.

We ask that you try to refrain from providing links, or enticing readers to go see what they’re doing. If you are unable to refrain from linking to these blogs, we do reserve the right to edit those links out of your comments.

All it does is drive up the traffic on those blogs, and gets other mudpuppies distressed. It is also useful to note - if those blogs have ads on them, each visit to those blogs is paying money to the blogger so you could actually be paying these bloggers money!

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Spam filter

The spam filter is hypervigilant and looking out for the best interest of the group. On The Mudflats it has saved us all from thousands of viagra ads, links to online gambling, Japanese stuff, and things we cannot describe in polite company and we expect that it will do the same on I Heart The Mudflats.

However, sometimes it will think that you, dear reader, are spam. We cannot always explain why this happens, but we offer the following insight and suggestions.

  • If you put multiple links in your post, you may be considered spam.
  • If you put a link and nothing else, you may be considered spam.
  • If you drop the F-bomb, you will definitely be considered spam.
  • If you have been spammed before, you will more likely be considered spam.
  • If the spam filter decides that your comment exceeeds “Rated PG”

Once you are thrown into the spam queue, your post will sit there until a moderator saves it. We usually try to do this several times a day, but spammers are relentless and make it difficult to keep up sometimes. When we see you buried there, I click a little box, liberate you from the Viagra party, and put you back to the discussion.

***However, if you have posted 8 or 10 times, we can only liberate ONE post. That means we have to throw 8 or 9 of your posts in the spam queue. This means you are more likely to be considered spam the next time. So, be patient, and know that we will retrieve your post as soon as we can.

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Trolls

A troll is someone who posts controversial, inflammatory, irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community, with the intention of provoking other users into an emotional response or to generally disrupt normal on-topic discussion.

If someone is an obvious troll, we banish them to the cold harsh world outside the Mudflats. However, just because someone disagrees with us, we do not automatically consider them a troll. If someone is respectful, curious, or willing to offer another side to the story, we are all ears. However, disrespectful language, profanity, personal attacks, and thoughtless outright trolling will not be tolerated. If there is a quasi-troll, we will first “spam” their comment. They will henceforth be immediately put in the spam queue. Then, when we go through the spam, and we see future posts, we can decide if they will enhance the conversation or not, and act accordingly.

If anyone sees an obvious troll, please use the contact form to let us know. Remember to tell us where the troll is - name of post, and time of comment - so we can find and vanquish them quickly.

Engaging trolls in conversation generally pumps them up with all kinds of goofy brain chemicals that make them behave even worse, as they revel in stressing out the community. So, please do not to feed the trolls. If they are ignored, they usually go away. If you feed them (post in response to their post) it only makes the problem worse, and upsets the people you like.

If anyone does feed a troll, we will need to delete their responses to the troll as well as the troll itself. This makes more of a clean up chore for us. So please abide by the ‘no feeding trolls’ rule.

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Questions?

You can submit questions via the Contact Us page - we will answer them as soon as we can, and they may be added to this page also too!

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